Studies in American Indian Literatures

The mirror fell off the wall, and Marcel knew that his father was dead in another country. Marcel reached his hand to his breast pocket and withdrew his watch from its place near his still-beating heart. The face told him the time, and the minute hand obediently ticked forward. Marcel sat down. He looked at the watch again. He thought of his sister laying the plates on the table for the evening meal. He thought of his mother, face tilted toward the sky, lifting her hand to suspend a crystal snowflake in the window of his father’s shop in Paris.

Marcel sat there, staring at the wall that had so recently released the mirror, at the faint outline where sunlight had faded the surface.

Marcel heard the handle of the door click open. Charles entered the room, his books and a newspaper tucked neatly in his arm, pressed snugly against his black overcoat. His shoulders bore the evidence of snowfall, but the flakes were quickly disappearing into the darkness of the wool. His eyes took in the surroundings: the unmade bed, the mirror sprawled on the floor with a jagged crack across its face, Marcel’s troubled expression. Charles closed the door quietly behind him. Charles crossed the room to his desk, slipped into his chair, and unfolded his newspaper. He sat, straight-backed, and opened the pages, the greyish newsprint like a sagging flag in his slender brown fingers. From behind the paper, Charles did not observe Marcel, although it would have been easy enough to do so. Charles was a man who respected another man’s dignity.

Marcel continued to stare at the wall. [End Page 71]

Charles shifted in his chair.

Snow floated silently from the sky in the fields beyond their shuttered window.

There had been no good news for months. Every day Charles would fortify himself to open the paper, scanning it quickly for dispatches from the correspondents at the Agency. It had been less than two weeks since Sitting Bull had died at the hands of Indian police. Sometimes, when he could voice the words, Charles read the news out loud to Marcel, who listened attentively. It was one of the many things Charles appreciated about his friend; Marcel did not resist hearing stories of the military campaigns on Indian lands. Marcel did not flinch at stories of starvation at the Agency or the persistence of the Ghost Dance; he neither defended nor decried the Seventh Cavalry. Marcel could take it in with perfect equanimity—the gift of his foreign blood. Why this was such a blessing Charles could not precisely express.

Occasionally the two men spoke to one another in French, a convergence they discovered soon after they arrived, from separate worlds, at Boston College. It had started as a little joke between them, when Marcel had cast a sly smile at Charles during a lecture on the French-Indian War. Their alliance was a conspiracy against history, a challenge to the end of the Seven Years War. By fate the two men had the same French surname, and this fate is perhaps the reason why they were assigned to share a room in the men’s hall. Roommates for the past three years, the pair now spent their Christmas holiday virtually alone in Boston. Neither could return to his own country.

Charles’s name was borrowed from the Jesuit fathers. From them he had adapted his tongue to French and Latin and the Eucharist, and as each of these alien tastes had dissolved in his mouth he felt hungry for more. The first foreign languages came a little easier to him than English. For Marcel it was much the same—first he spoke his mother tongue, then Latin, then English. When the two friends needed to speak most easily to one another they fell into French. But Charles remained always alone in his own first language.

In their quiet room, Charles fixed his eyes on the front page. A [End Page 72] FIGHT WITH THE HOSTILES. BIG FOOT’S TREACHERY PRECIPITATES A BATTLE.

Marcel groaned softly as he allowed his body to...